Smash hit: on hand for a historic celestial crash, an aging satellite takes a final bow.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-SEP-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution

When NASA steered its Deep Impact probe into a comet on July 4, capturing imaginations worldwide with a spectacular crash, a six-year-old Harvard-Smithsonian satellite taken out of hibernation just for the occasion had a front row ticket to the event, the first time scientists engineered a collision with a heavenly body.

The satellite, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of several instruments in space that along with...

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